Speed run of Pikmin 2 in 5:21, 8 game days with 0 deaths, completed on October 12 2004. See author's comments for timing note. Available in three versions, low quality which cuts out some less important parts of the run, and normal & high quality.

Author's comments:
I actually wanted to delay buying Pikmin 2 for a few weeks after its release because I was working on a project in the first Pikmin. After the 9-day 50-pikmin completion was realized I was playing it like crazy... but as a result I was really itching for this game and only held out 3 days before getting it. The first Pikmin hasn't been back in my cube since!

When I heard about the 8-day completion for Pikmin 2 before getting it, I was disappointed that this game must be shorter than the first game, which takes 9 days. But soon I learned that that isn't the case at all, because the majority of the game takes place underground and when there, time on the surface is mysteriously stopped. To get an 8-day completion you only need the proper overworld strategies, and since the first 2 days are basically game tutorials there's only 6 days worth of work. The caves only require the right pikmin color set and persistance. I also wanted to do a 0-death run though, just because it's cool and the runs on Pikmin were all 0-death. It might actually be slightly faster to use deaths, perhaps by feeding whites to enemies to poison them, but I kinda doubt it. This run is also a 'no corpse' run, that is I don't collect any corpses in caves for pocket pokos. At the end you can see the total treasure value of all treasures is 26985. Nintendo obviously wasn't aiming for any round numbers! I skipped corpse money mainly because it's worthless, and because it's another thing to make the run cool. :-p In a few cases it costs me a bit to stop pikmin heading back to the pod with some, but I doubt it ever equals the time of the cutscene you get on the first one you bring back. I also find it rather freaky that the treasure value at the end of day 7 (everything but Wistful Wild) is 13700. Why? Because 1:37 was my famous Metroid Prime speed run of course!

A note about the timing. The game keeps track of your real time, and keeps a high score of it for paying off the debt and collecting everything... that's actually the reason I wanted to record the whole game and not just the overworld for showing how to do the 8-day run (which I figured out by myself BTW, didn't look at the faq until after I was done and saw the writer did a lot of things differently from me). Anyway while I was working on day 8 I noticed after a few cave levels that my time remained at 3:33. I guess I should mention that there's no way I did every day in one sitting. I did hundreds of resets in caves because of deaths, being slow or awful random layouts. I figure if the game is going to forcefully save after every level, I might as well use it to optimize my run. The total number of segments for the run is 106, and I cut and appeneded everything together to form the 8 days and 2 high score vids. Anyway after I saw that I had 3:33 after four cave levels and had only advanced 12 minutes from the start of day 8 when I had recorded nearly 19 minutes of video, I realized what was going on. Just like Metroid 2, a 13 year old game, it was only saving the whole minutes when you save, the seconds get chopped off. When you play normally you wouldn't notice, since you're not resetting after every cave level, and probably not timing yourself either!

Anyway I decided to do the same as metroid 2 and do a manual timing instead. I start from the same point as the game, when the opening cutscene begins, and stop at the end of the 'you got everything' cutscene at the end of day 8. Two things are actually missing which count for time. I was cutting off the vids as soon as the save window started to appear at the end of the day just to reduce their size a little bit. The time from then to returning to the area selection is 8.7 seconds. Since there's six missing saves, I added 53.2 seconds for that. Another missing piece is in day 7. After I clear out Frontier Cavern, it jumps straight to level 1 of Subterranean complex. I forgot to extract the small section of me going from the ship to there. You're not missing anything important, all I do is take out 10 more reds and head straight there. The enemies are already dead and the wall is already done. It's almost the same as my earlier trek to frontier cavern, which took 1:38, so I just added that as the time for the missing piece. The total time comes out to 5:21:04, so since the real missing section was probably shorter the run would really be 5:20 if I had the missing piece... but I'll leave it as 5:21 out of my stupidity. Who's going to suffer all the resets to beat me anyway? ;-)

The run comes in three qualities; I recommend the high if you can download the 2.36 gigs! They look almost as good as the original captures. For the low quality, I actually totally snipped out a lot of the run, they include the overworld portions so you can see how to do an 8-day game, and the final floors of caves so you can see my 0-death strategies.

A few comments about each day:

Day 1: Snore! I wish the game would be consistent about letting you skip cutscenes. Why can I skip 80% of them but not ALL OF THEM!

Day 2: I need to grow a lot of pikmin here without taking too much time and thankfully the bulborbs dropped some pellets to help out. Just like with day 1 I can't wait around for them to flower.

Day 3: While the newly flowered reds are breaking down the gate, I use the purples to kill things at the start, make more reds and bring the strawberry close. I avoid getting it until later to avoid the 10% recovered blurb. The caves here are easy but I did do quite a few resets on level 4 of white flower garden. Oh yeah, you can actually tell which cave levels I got on my first try if you listen close: the tone from saving will continue to fade instead of ending abruptly. The real meat of this day is after you have the whites, there's just enough time to get down the two poison walls and dig up the pilgrim bulb and get a lot of red berries with Louie while that's happening. I do a bit of sequence breaking by getting the Healing Cask without yellows. It's not necessary, it can easily be gotten on day 5... I just wanted to show that off.

Day 4: For my day 6 strategy to work I must have the electrified gate to the ragu lid down in this day. To do this requires tossing yellows with a running start so they go over the top. After breeding my yellows I set aside 15 to get the two parts near the berry plants, and then put 10 on the glutton's kitchen wall and the rest on the ragu wall. I managed to not call three of them I had left on the higher ledge and didn't notice until much later, so I could have saved the few seconds of waiting for the ragu wall to fall otherwise. In glutton's kitchen I almost had a disaster on the way to the purple candypop... but thankfully I pulled it off, because the randomness of that floor was really getting to me. I grew more reds than needed in this day: I have 26 when I reach day 8 when I only use 5... but since I do this growing while pikmin elsewhere are doing work, it's no time lost.

Day 5: A little more sequence breaking here when I toss one white into the water and call him to the other side so he gets to work on the poison bridge. Again I could just as easily have waited until later and put all 5 whites on it, but it's cooler ;-) The two sheargrubs that I lost time on trying to get into the yellow onion weren't even necesarry. I had 46 from the cloaking burrow-nit, and I only ever have 45 out for the rest of the run. I set aside 18 yellows to put 17 on the electric wall the Bulblax Kingdom so that I have 20 left to put on the mario paint tube as I take the blues to the bridge. I have to have 100 blues by the end of the day, so I get 42 in snagret hole from the buds and then use the regenerating poseys and sheargrubs to grow the rest before and after doing Bulblax Kingdom.

Day 6: Here the game decided to shaft me, twice. The first was that the ragu wall is still partially up! Back on day 4 I entered Glutton's Kitchen right as it started the final falling, and you heard the bleep-bleep for it falling during the cutscene of jumping in the cave. That wasn't enough I guess, because it saved that it still needed 1 hit to bring it down. So, I took out only 99 blues and 1 yellow to get it down. Later I swap it back for a blue with a little trouble, so I can use the 15 that brought the ragu lid back to do even more sequence breaking. Tossing the blues with a running start lets you break open the Shower Room cave and drain the pool without breaking down the electric wall. That lets me break said wall down without building the bridge! The 2nd time the game screwed me was in Submerged Castle. The randomness in level 3 was just about to drive me crazy, when I finally got something good and went to level 4. There I was shocked to see I only had 74 pikmin, not 75. I watched the vid from day 3 and the counter just dropped from 75 to 74 after I plucked whites as Louie, switched to Olimar and then back to Louie. A camera swing I did allowed the white pikmin to barely be seen falling to its death under the level... it had somehow fallen through the floor like the "mysterious deaths" that plagued the first Pikmin when you swarmed enemies. Thankfully I made backup saves at the start of every day, so I only had to redo day 6, but then the randomness of level 3 again got to me... took nearly 2 hours to get an acceptable layout. Shower Room is a breeze by comparison.

Day 7: I had to rewatch the president saying "I shall go" every time I needed to redo the first part of this day, but I cut the credits vid from the first go. Since I need 100 purples at the start of day 8 and there's just not enough purple candypops in the game to get that many in one go, I put 20 reds and one purple at frontier cavern and wait for all the overworld parts to reach the ship, then head in. I use the purple to get bitter spray on level 1, although I'm not sure the time to do that was worth it, since near the end I had so many sprays I was stretching it to use them, and even have 1 at the very end I didn't use. After converting my reds I exit and then take out more to do the caves. Yellows and blues aren't needed at all, so I only have purples and whites at the end of sub complex.

Day 8: The hardest part of the 8-day run, not because the caves are so hard, but because the timing of the overworld is very tight. In my practice run (When I was figuring out how to do an 8-day run) I entered the 3rd cave with a 1 on the screen. This time it was just a 6. I went up to 50 whites in earlier days to get the poison wall down in just the right amount of time, but then I have to swap most of them for yellows so I can slaughter the Titan Dweevil in 2.5 minutes. I should have brought a few more whites into the final cave though because the poison chutes took a bit too long to take out.

It's worth downloading the credits & ending file to see my high scores. In the ending file you can see the stats of the first time I finished the game in 3rd place (30:31 time!) and my practice 8-day run in 2nd. Oh and just for kicks I want to mention that I used the same VirtualDub process during the 2 weeks I spent on the run to cut out and compress the files. At the end it had over 30 hours of CPU time on my poor, old, overworked p3-450.